Simmel, Benjamin and Berman: Different Forms of Resistance?

As a sociologist, Georg Simmel raises issues of modernity to reflect upon the loss of “autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life” (Simmel 409). In his analysis, human beings are demanded to be segmented by the “functional specialization” (Simmel 409) of the “money economy” of the metropolitan life (Simmel 412). Modern man are then taught to have more “intellectuality” and to become more “calculating” which would coalesce into “a structure of the highest subjectivity” (Simmel 413). In response to this impersonal existence of metropolitan life, Simmel poses the notion of “the blasé attitude” (413) in which Simmel does not imply the blunting of discrimination but experiencing the meaning and values of things as “insubstantial” (414). And it is only with this blasé attitude that we can “understand” the metropolitan life in the modern cities.

Behind the wording of “money economy” or “specialization” that one may take them as heritage from Marxism, Simmel indicates an attitude of understand as a form of resistance to the metropolitan life, instead of accusing or pardoning.

As a Marxist, Marxist in the general sense, Benjamin raises issue of modernity to reflect upon the overwhelming control of the modern city and modern ways of life in the city. There is no revolutionary claim in works of Benjamin, either; Benjamin takes a stance of resistance with the slow pace of the flâneur, with the detached distance to watch as the individual’s traces are obliterated in the big city crowd: “His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists” (Benjamin 54).

For Benjamin’s point of view, the resistance to the modernization of the city could take form in the pace of the turtle: to take a turtle for a walk in the arcade is itself a gesture of resistance.

Marshall Berman, in his discussion of Baudelaire and Benjamin, forecasts a methodology to recapture “the more metabolic and dialectical flow” of the constant currents of modernity (Berman 147). He endeavors to seek out the contradictions or transformations that animate the modern city street and the inner life of the man on the street (that is, the “fluidity” and vaporousness” of modern life) (Berman 144). He indicates that there are contradictions. In analyzing Haussmann’s design of Paris and in tearing down the slums, Berman also argues the contradictory and ironic nature of modernity: as the poor were driven out of sight, they were coming back directly to everyone’s line of vision. The essence of modernity is contradictory but dialectic (that is why both the modernist and anti-modernist are coming to the street in the endlessly moving traffic.)

Berman takes a dialectic reading strategy into the modernity and the city. The mobility guaranteed in the dialectic process is itself a form of resistance. This is also why Berman concludes his essay by the line: “to lose our haloes and find ourselves anew” (Berman 171), in the sense that the implications of the haloes could be changing in different times.

Among Simmel, Benjamin and Berman, who’s strategy of resistance provides us the most sufficient or fertile ground for discussion? Who’s strategy promises the most efficient (maybe the word “efficient” is itself contradictory in the application to resist) result in resistance?